by Wayson Choy
“Liang small enough to ride no charge,” Poh-Poh said, but I—oh, a big boy like our First Son—would have cost the family an exorbitant full fare. “Father not rich,” she concluded, “so you, Kiam-Kim, sacrifice yourself and stay home.”
“Final decision,” said Father, lowering his glasses.
I sensed they must have known the secret for a long time, waiting until they were ready to leave to tell me. Still, I was keen to probe for more information.
“How am I going to get a brand-new brother?”
Stepmother nudged Father.
“Well,” Father said, snapping shut his leather briefcase. “How? First, lots of boring paperwork. Documents still to read, blank spaces to fill out, to sign.”
“Yes,” Stepmother said, her delicate lips barely moving, half whispering her words. “Too much … documents.”
“Then?”
“If everyone … agrees …”
“Then, Kiam-Kim, if things work out—” Father stared steadily at Stepmother’s back “—if everything agreeable, your new brother soon join the family.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s four years old, Kiam,” Father said. “Half your age.”
“He’ll be your Second Brother,” Stepmother said. “Won’t you like that? I think that I—I might like that.”
Father caught her eye and seemed pleased.
“Second?” I asked.
“Number Two,” Father said. “You be First Son, Dai-goh, you be Big Brother to him.”
“You be boss,” Stepmother said, repeating how Third Uncle told me that in Canada being “boss” or “Number One Boss” was best, like my being First Son.
“What if Second Brother doesn’t want to join us?” I asked.
“Don’t worry so much,” Stepmother said.
“And it’s a—a secret,” warned Father. “Can you keep a secret?”
I stood up straight and nodded. A shuffling sound was coming from below the staircase.
“Kiam-Kim!” Poh-Poh shouted up at me. “Too many questions!”
I carried Stepmother’s small suitcase down the stairs so she could carry Liang, twisting with excitement. In the hallway, she put Liang down and put on the second-hand wool coat that Mrs. Ben Chong had picked out for her at the China Relief Bazaar, the one held every three months at the Mission Church. Father opened the front door. In the sunshine, a taxi stood waiting at the curb; the driver stepped out and opened the trunk.
My head began to buzz: what if I shoved my way into the trunk and refused to leave it?
“In China,” Father began in formal Cantonese, “a First Son cheerfully fulfills his filial duty.”
The bleak, lecturing tone made it clear that staying home and assisting Poh-Poh were among those cheerful duties.
When the three of them left in the taxi, and the front door closed behind them, I thought, Vancouver is not China! and began to sulk.
“Come,” Poh-Poh commanded from the kitchen. “I give First Son a taste of plantation cane.”
From the blue bowl on the kitchen table, I took one of the soaking brown pieces she was using in her cooking and began to gnaw on the chewy stump. Instantly, a thin line of cloying liquid ran down my chin.
My own Number One Brain, Chinese or not, suddenly felt mired: I had been ensnared by a finger-joint of sugar cane, lured back into the kitchen where Poh-Poh’s treacherous white crown had been waiting to outsmart me. When she reached for the flowery apron hanging on a hook, I grimaced, but it was not compelling enough to distract her weathered hands from flinging the apron into the air like a net and quickly catching the flaps around me. I yelped, but a relentless palm twirled me around; lightning fingers snatched away the chewed-up cane, tossed it back on the kitchen table, and knotted the double-folded apron tightly around my waist.
Bluebells and violets, red and yellow roses, and swirling pink petals cascaded in repeated patterns all the way down to my bare knees. I looked like a meadow in bloom. It was useless for me to smile, hopeless for me to grin, and futile for me to laugh: a wily old Fox Lady had trapped her innocent victim in an oilcloth apron of sissy flowers.
Poh-Poh lifted up my shirt sleeve to study the bony appendage of my arm, just as I would have inspected a held-up limb of one of those large, squirming toads Jack O’Connor and I regularly caught at MacLean Park. Or just as the famished Fox Lady would study its prey before … before I knew what was happening, a knobby thumb and forefinger encircled my wrist. Grandmother made a pitying face and took on the talk-story voice of the disappointed Demon Fox,
“Have bigger shank bones in soup pot!”
That was when I should have laughed at the silly joke, remembering that that was what the lip-smacking Fox Lady always declared before she locked away her struggling main course to be fattened up. Instead, a scowl stretched the corners of my mouth and I pulled back my skinny arm. But I knew it was pointless for me to resist: Poh-Poh would have her way.
Father had that afternoon warned me to be on my best behaviour and to help the Old One prepare the sui-yah, the late-night dishes, for her party of mahjong ladies. “Keep busy tonight,” Father had advised me. “Obey your grandmother and keep the family secret.”
I knew there was nothing else to do but to observe Poh-Poh, apron-wrapped in the kitchen, in the midst of a squadron of pots and pans being heated on the stove, surrounded by bowls and plates loaded with the food that she had chopped and sliced all afternoon, and obey. And keep the family secret.
Poh-Poh herself looked unnaturally plump, with her long white apron tied over her blue-quilted jacket and black Old China pants. Between her rolled-up ankle stockings and the edge of those pant legs, I glimpsed her long johns. In the early fall, with the North Shore mountain winds coming down into Vancouver and the constant fog rising from Burrard Inlet, she always felt vulnerable to drafts and chills. Still, with her hands slapping pot lids shut, her sturdy body shuffling the unprepared carrots, turnips, and leafy greens, bringing out the platters of raw meat and chicken wings from the icebox outside on the back porch, Poh-Poh wheeled back and forth like a bun-haired dervish.
“I save carrots for you to do,” she said.
Then she took the greens and chopped away with her cleaver, lifting each mound of vegetable with the flat of her blade and sliding exact portions into ceramic bowls; finally, she slapped the meat down and minced with the blade faster than my eyes could see, the rhythm of her chopping and mincing beat-beating like a drum on the cherrywood block. My sulk vanished. Any thoughts of a new brother receded. I was captivated. The climax came when the Old One grabbed the cleaver to hook the anvil-handle of the peep-grill, snapping the iron cover up to study the licking flames in the roaring belly of the stove. Hot enough to heat the rooms and, later, to sizzle the food. All at once, she pulled the blade away and the iron grill landed with an ear-shattering BANG!
I jumped.
In all Poh-Poh’s stories, the clever children escaped the clutches of the ravenous Fox Lady and came back to the village to warn others. I thought of telling Jack O’Connor to be very careful of old ladies who offered him sugar cane, who would wrap him in a shroud of flowers and fix their beady eyes on him.
“Keep busy,” Poh-Poh said. “Taste this all-day melon soup.”
She handed me a small bowl of steaming amber. Somehow, her Tohng-Yahn no had read my long and wistful face: my brain cells had been wondering, while I waited for the soup to cool, how I could tell Jack O’Connor the family secret.
“Taste now,” said Poh-Poh.
The soup tasted like warm chicken broth. Pieces of salty melon pulp burst into tangy sweetness. It was perfect. I tipped the small bowl and slurped up every crystal drop.
“Maybe,” I said, “too salty.”
“Bullshit,” Poh-Poh said, using one of the half-dozen English words she had picked up from Third Uncle’s labourers. She snatched the empty bowl from my hand before I could ask for more.
Acting grown-up, I said, “Not nice.”
“Shut up,�
� she said in English, without a trace of accent.
Satisfied with her orderly fleet of plates and utensils, her eyes glowing from the heat of the stove, Poh-Poh loosened her apron to fan more heat into the dining room. She asked me to thump the sawdust chute feeding one end of the stove.
My fists battered the galvanized sides until the load of sawdust inside made a gradual whoosh as it slid down towards the flames. Poh-Poh then directed me to wash my hands in the sink before I tackled my next job. I stood on tiptoe and reached over the deep metal basin and wrung my fingers under the cold tap water. Poh-Poh roughly dried my hands on a length of clean towel that hung on a wooden roller beside the back door.
“Stand on this,” she commanded. With a slippered foot she shoved sideways against an empty crate until it banged into the deep metal sink. Everything smelled of sauces and crackling firewood. She handed me back the half-chewed stump of sugar cane.
As I sucked, I looked down at the colourful label covering the slats of the crate. Between slurps, I read out loud: “Bee-Seee Ap-ples.”
“Too smart,” Poh-Poh said. “Stand up.”
“Frae-sir Val-leee Eee-daan Farm.”
Using my best English, and pronouncing carefully, I told Poh-Poh, “The Val-lee is the food bas-ket-lah of Vancouver,” just as my teacher at Strathcona had taught us. By the end of Grade 2, I knew more about British Columbia than I could ever remember about China.
“You mo no,” Poh-Poh repeated, after I badly translated into Toishan the idea that Fraser Valley Eden Farm was “the Big Paradise Apple-Box of Upside-down Mountain.”
“Nonsense,” she said and snatched the acid-sweet cane from my lips.
However they were translated, Grandmother took no pleasure in the faan gwai English words, the foreign demon words, though she was clearly jealous of my expert ability to read the complex labels of apple crates and grocery tins. I could even read the Grade 3 Look-and-Learn books like This Is the House That Jack Built. (Jack O’Connor knew that one by heart.) But instead of commending me as Stepmother and Father did, the Old One fretted over how her grandson squinted and stumbled over flimsy Chinese textbooks yet somehow could read, even with one eye shut, page after page of rhyming English words; she complained how her no-brain grandson could pivot a pencil into ten English sentences faster than he could daub a brush over just one single Chinese ideogram. Worse, she wrung her hands and warned Third Uncle and big Mrs. Lim, who only sulked to hear the latest news about me, that First Son was muttering more Chinglish than Chinese.
She begged of them, “What will happen to my grandson? What will happen to Kiam-Kim?”
I thought Poh-Poh took things too seriously. Whenever I looked in the mirror and saw my narrow eyes and pug nose, there was no escaping the fact that I was my father’s son, and I would always be her grandson. She and the elders often worried about children like myself, whom they called juk-sing, bamboo stumps, who were sturdy outside but held a hollow emptiness within.
Sometimes Poh-Poh held me by my shoulders and looked into my eyes as if she wanted to drill deep inside me, to see if anything of value was filling up that hollow domain. I would speak to her, say something that was using my very best half-Chinese, half-English sentences, and she would choke and choke at the apparent absurdity of my statements.
At those times, I thought of all the wrinkle-faced people, white-haired people with furrowed brows from Eastern European countries and from Italy, who sat on their porches and on the steps along Keefer Street, and how sadly they sometimes looked upon the lot of us white and yellow kids romping together on the streets. Their disapproving glances and shouts for their grandchildren to rejoin them on the porch made me think they all longed for us to be among our own kind, just as they once were: children of a single language and a single community.
“Fraser Valley …,” I said even louder and kicked the box hard. “Eden Farm.”
“Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh warned, “you soon forget—you China!”
I started to protest. She bowed her head and began dabbing her eyes with the corner of her white apron.
“On—onions …,” she said.
Just as she turned her back to me, I snatched the chewed-up sugar cane and stuffed it in my mouth to suck out its last bit of pulpy sweetness. Then I loudly and rudely spat the stringy fibres into the compost bin.
“I’m finished,” I said and jumped off the wooden crate.
“You clean and cut carrots for me.”
She did not even turn around. I picked up the dull scraping knife and pulled up a chair. The carrots were thick and twisted. Her old chin rose to beg the tolerance of the Kitchen God for the salvation of her mo-no grandson.
The wild-eyed Kitchen God was only a picture on a placard, an ancient warrior printed on a small poster stuck just above the stove, but she mumbled something to him. Scraping away, I mumbled something, too.
“Careful,” Poh-Poh said. “Tsao Chung hear you.”
I made a face at Tsao Chung and didn’t even care if all my few Chinese brain cells withered away.
She lifted her know-it-all eyebrow. “You ask for more blessing or trouble?”
At my look of surprise, she burst out laughing and left me by myself in the prickly heat of the Kitchen God’s kingdom.
As I yanked the green, ferny tops from the knobby carrots, my head began to work out the things both Third Uncle and Grandmother taught me that would either bless me or trouble my life.
Between hacking into spittoons, the elders were always proclaiming ten thousand this or ten thousand that. “Ten thousand blessings!” Third Uncle would exclaim if his business went well; then, Poh-Poh would laugh and warn him, “Aaaiiyaah! Ten thousand troubles!”
Sure enough, the stock market crashed. Ten thousand troubles landed upon our doorstep.
Grandmother explained to me that her words were meant to chase away the envy of the gods, but she had not been present to utter the right incantations when Third Uncle boasted of his growing bank account over business lunches with the H.Y. Louie and the Yip Sang merchant families. Women were never invited to those lunches. Poh-Poh told me how in America some months ago men jumped out of buildings when the value of investments dropped. Third Uncle had even thought of killing himself, but Poh-Poh reminded him to think of his new family in Gold Mountain. As a family, Father assured him, we would survive. Third Uncle joined the merchants for their regular luncheon.
“They never invite women,” Poh-Poh explained. “No woman die for money.”
The last carrot waited to be scuffed and washed. The idea of having a new brother sent my mind searching for blessings.
Whenever anyone offered Chinatown children candy, we were taught to refuse at least twice, so one would be humble and worthy of a final third offering. Whenever I expected too much, like lots of lucky money at New Year’s, I would walk past the small Goddess of Mercy in our parlour, behave as if I didn’t care how much lucky money I might get, that I wasn’t greedy or grasping. I wanted only luck.
Big Mrs. Lim always told me that the gods and ghosts look for ways to trick you. It was no use my saying I never saw any gods or ghosts; apparently they were everywhere. I was in even more danger, she warned, because I did not see them. Other children saw them, she told me and Poh-Poh, like the Lon Sing twins, who finished each other’s sentences, and the Chiangs’ little girl, who went mad with hearing ghost voices and fell into a coma and died.
“Expect nothing,” Father told me, “and anything that comes will be a gift.”
“Be patient,” Stepmother had cautioned me that very morning. “Keep deep longings to yourself.”
I thought of what everyone had said to me when I got all Excellent on my first report card.
“Even white people say,” Third Uncle said, “ ‘Never show poker hand.’ Pretend you got Needs Improvement.”
Mrs. Lim warned me not to strut too much. “The cocky rooster makes the best soup.”
Grandmother told me that when I was a baby in China, whenever sh
e took me outside, she complained out loud of my wretchedly pinched eyes and snot-running nose, so the gods would not be jealous and snatch me away.
I fought down my excitement: I would set an example for my promised Second Brother when he disembarked; that is, I would be openly disappointed with him. But why would any jealous god worry about me as Number One Boss? What example was I, wrapped in a flowery apron, wearily scrubbing carrots and wiping at my nose with the back of my wet and skinny wrist?
Poh-Poh stepped back into the kitchen. She had oiled and neatly primped up her hair with her jade hairpieces. I lifted the long knife, as she and Stepmother had taught me, and began slowly, carefully, slicing the carrots at an angle. Grandmother ignored me until she noticed my runny nose. She took a tissue from her sleeve and made me blow three times. She washed her hands, then began wiping the wok with a tiny mop soaked with cooking oil. My eyes glazed with thought. Between her humming a singsong tune, she broke into comment whenever she felt like it.
“Kiam-Kim thinks too much,” she told the Kitchen God, her tune faltering between some nonsense lyrics. “Aaaiiyaah, what proper girl will ever marry my worthless grandson!”
I reminded myself that the so-called Kitchen God was only a small, heat-curled poster pinned on the wall. He looked like a warrior in one of my floppy Chinese comic books.
“At the end of this year, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh went on in her lecturing tone, “the Kitchen God Tsao Chung will tell tales about the family.”
I knew that. I handed her the plate of cut carrots.
“Tsao Chung soon fly back up to Heaven to the Jade Emperor.”
I knew that, too. During the last week of the year, after smearing the paper lips with a dab of honey to sweeten his words, Grandmother had Father walk out the back porch and set Tsao Chung free by burning him up in a clay pot in front of all the family. Transformed by the fire into smoke, Tsao Chung began his journey to Heaven to report on our family. Last year, as Poh-Poh solemnly followed the rising vapours, Father nudged me and winked. Then he threw the ashes into the air. Poh-Poh stared at the fragments, never looking away until every bit of ash vanished skyward. By the second week of the New Year, a new Kitchen God would be pinned in the same place.